Strategy question
You have capacity for one major growth investment next quarter, but stakeholders are split between a long-term platform capability and several urgent customer- or sales-driven requests. How would you evaluate the tradeoffs, choose what makes the roadmap, and build alignment across product, engineering, design, data, and GTM?
- Glean
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Ability to make a hard build versus serve tradeoff and bring a genuinely split set of cross functional stakeholders to alignment.
How to approach it
- Frame the tradeoff explicitly: the platform capability likely compounds value across many future customers and requests, while the urgent asks solve specific, immediate revenue or retention risk.
- Quantify each side where possible, estimating how many future requests or deals the platform capability would unblock versus the near term revenue or churn risk tied to the urgent asks.
- Check whether the urgent requests are symptoms of the missing platform capability, since if several sales driven asks all point back to the same underlying gap, investing in the platform capability may actually resolve them indirectly.
- Use that finding, if true, to reframe the choice from either or to the platform investment being the faster path to satisfying urgent needs too.
- If the urgent asks are genuinely unrelated to the platform gap, make an explicit call on which one better protects near term revenue given limited capacity, and communicate the tradeoff plainly to GTM.
- Build alignment by presenting the data backed reasoning to all stakeholders together, rather than negotiating separately, so the tradeoff and its logic are visible to everyone.
What a strong answer includes
- Checks whether urgent customer asks are actually symptoms of the missing platform capability before treating them as a separate tradeoff.
- Quantifies both sides with a reasonable assumption instead of arguing from instinct alone.
- Reframes the decision when the data supports it, showing the platform investment could serve both goals.
- Builds alignment transparently with all stakeholders in the room rather than one on one lobbying.
Common mistakes
- Treating the platform investment and urgent requests as entirely unrelated without checking for a common root cause.
- Making the call unilaterally without a transparent process that brings skeptical stakeholders along.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you do if the urgent request and the platform capability turned out to be unrelated after all?
- How would you handle a GTM stakeholder who still disagreed after seeing the data?
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More questions from Glean
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovering and Sizing AI Opportunities
- Chapter 9: Measuring AI Product Economics
- Chapter 14: Interviewing for AI PM Roles